Aston Martin is as British as James Bond. But it could soon become Chinese
Aston Martin is as British as James Bond. But it could soon become Chinese
Ben MarlowSun, May 10, 2026 at 5:00 AM UTC
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aston martin
Like its patron James Bond, Aston Martin’s suppliers are used to living life on the edge.
The iconic carmaker has gone bust seven times; meaning those that provide the parts to build its luxury vehicles are well-accustomed to operating under constant uncertainty.
A 2018 stock market listing was supposed to represent a break with its chequered past. Prospective new investors were sold a vision of a company primed for a bold new era of expansion that would enable Aston Martin to shake off its reputation as a niche brand to compete with the likes of Ferrari.
Ambitious plans had been drawn up to build a brand new manufacturing plant in St Athan, Wales, as part of a £200m investment proposal backed by the Welsh government.
The proposals were underpinned by a roster of new models that would turbo-charge growth and enable Aston Martin to crack new markets. The line-up included the DBX, its first-ever SUV, and the Rapide-E, the carmaker’s debut electric model – much to the chagrin of Aston Martin’s diehard petrolheads.
In the run-up to going public, the 113-year-old carmaker had chalked up seven consecutive quarters of profitability, convincing many in the City that Aston Martin was ready to leave its tumultuous past behind.
Bosses at the time told the stock market, “We don’t make cars, we make dreams”, a nod to their belief that Aston Martin was more like a luxury goods producer in the mould of a Gucci, Burberry or LVMH than a boring old carmaker.
But less than a fortnight ago, the company delivered another stark reminder of how emphatically it has failed to live up to that hype.
A £50m cash injection from a consortium backed by Lawrence Stroll, the billionaire chairman, marked the eighth time that Aston Martin has sought emergency funds as a public company.
Lawrence Stroll accused co-owner Geely of trying to buy Aston Martin ‘on the cheap’ in 2022 - Mark Thompson/Getty Images
The total raised from shareholders stands at around £2bn, while a further £2bn in financial support has come from banks and the bond markets. Yet it remains heavily loss-making, posting a 25pc jump in pre-tax losses last year to £364m.
Aston Martin’s single biggest source of capital has long been Stroll, who rescued the company in 2020 and is now the largest shareholder with a 31pc stake.
And although he reaffirmed his financial commitment in an interview last year, there are doubts about how long that will last, especially when other investors are losing faith.
Amid concerns about management’s failure to slow the cash burn, Aston Martin’s shares have sunk to record lows. Having listed with a valuation of £4.3bn, it now has a market capitalisation of just £430m.
“At the end of the day, Stroll is a serious businessman, and you would’ve thought at some point even he would say, ‘How deep do I need to go here to keep it going?’” a major supplier warns.
A motoring executive questions whether the lifelong motor-racing tycoon has effectively “got what he wants” out of his association with Aston Martin, having recently secured the rights to use the Aston Martin name for his Formula One team – for which his son Lance drives – in perpetuity.
Some also doubt Aston Martin will ever be financially viable, just weeks after it cut a fifth of its 3,000-strong workforce.
One car-making veteran says: “I was at Aston Martin in the 1970s making the V8 model, and it was loss-making then.”
With Chinese car giant Geely among Aston Martin’s three biggest shareholders, industry figures fear the alternative if Stroll develops cold feet: another opportunistic takeover that could lead to the further erosion of Britain’s car-making capabilities.
Though Geely has received plaudits for its careful stewardship of Swedish car-making royalty Volvo, its ownership of UK-based Lotus sports cars has been less successful, and has resulted in some of its models being made at a factory in Wuhan.
This should be enough to raise alarm bells in Westminster over the future of Aston Martin at a time of accelerating de-industrialisation.
Increasingly starved of critical know-how, materials and manufacturing capabilities, the country is becoming ever more reliant on foreign imports at a time of growing global instability.
Ministers can ill afford for the UK’s industrial base to be hollowed out further. Are they happy for a Chinese company to control the fate of another important slice of UK engineering, and the intellectual property and research and development that comes with it?
The UK car industry is already grappling with a “low-volume crisis” caused by a combination of post-Brexit trade friction, post-Covid parts shortages, and sky-high energy prices, says Prof David Bailey, a car industry expert and professor at Birmingham Business School.
Sean Connery with an Aston Martin DB5 in 1964. His character James Bond is perhaps the brand’s most famous customer - United Artists/Allstar Picture Library
Although Aston Martin may only produce a few thousand cars annually compared to the 400,000 that Jaguar Land Rover pushed out the year before it was sidelined by a cyber attack, behind every manufacturer is a whole ecosystem of co-dependent suppliers, engineers, designers and factory workers, suppliers say.
“Aston Martin, like JLR, Bentley and McLaren, is not just an iconic brand – it is the anchor of a skilled supply chain employing hundreds of thousands of people,” says Dave Roberts, chief executive of Evtech, a key supplier to Aston Martin and other British carmakers.
MG Rover’s long march to China
The shadow of MG Rover’s collapse in 2005 still looms large over British carmaking.
Car Magazine published an obituary of sorts last year to mark the 20th anniversary of what is considered by many to be the industry’s darkest day and the moment when the sector entered a state of permanent decline.
“The closure of MG Rover Group wasn’t just the end of a company. It was the final curtain for Britain’s last native mass-market carmaker. A century of heritage, absorbed into the ether in a matter of weeks,” says Keith Adams, the editor of Parkers, the car review website.
It also paved the way for China’s entry into the UK car market, a moment that still reverberates today.
In the build-up, Sir Tony Blair’s government had spent months trying to persuade Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), one of China’s largest car manufacturers, to save a business whose Longbridge plant was widely considered to represent the heart of British carmaking.
Yet, despite the offer of a £100m government-backed bridging loan, SAIC walked away. Four months later, Nanjing Automotive, another Chinese carmaker, swooped in, snapping up the rights to the MG brand, the Longbridge production facility and MG’s engine technology for just £53m.
Nanjing merged with SAIC in 2007, by which point any hope that MG Rover’s manufacturing prowess could be preserved had long since evaporated. The previous year, an attempt by Nanjing to calm mounting doubts about its ownership had fallen spectacularly flat.
Workers cheer the last Classic Mini to roll off Longbridge’s production line in 2000. It was to prove prophetic - Dan Chung/Reuters
The trade unions had been led to believe that car production at Longbridge was on the verge of being revived. Yet Nanjing revealed it was willing to invest just £10m to produce 15,000 cars a year at a site that had been churning out more than 100,000 cars annually before MG Rover went under.
But the hollowing-out of MG Rover under its Chinese owners was already well under way. Within months of acquiring the business, Nanjing had begun moving thousands of tons of Longbridge machinery to a new plant being built in Pukou, eastern China.
Nanjing had even brought in its own engineers from its homeland – together with a team of Chinese cooks – to dismantle the plant, in a move critics called “lift and shift”.
It was the beginning of a long march to China for what remained of MG Rover. SAIC ended what little remained of production in Longbridge for good in 2026.
Just over a century after automotive pioneer Herbert Austin had assembled his first car there, all that remained of what was once a symbol of Britain’s industrial might was a sales and marketing department.
The rest of the sprawling 468-acre site was eventually bulldozed and turned into thousands of new homes, apartments, offices and shops.
Though the redevelopment has brought regeneration to the area, local figures such as Richard Burden, the former MP for the Birmingham Northfield constituency where Longbridge previously sat, argue that it has struggled to recover from its closure.
MG Rover churned out more than 100,000 cars a year at Longbridge before going under - PA Photo
Somewhere once regarded as a relatively prosperous working-class area now has some of the highest poverty rates in the country.
To rub salt in the wounds of the 6,000 workers that lost their jobs when MG Rover went bust, the MG brand has gone from strength to strength under Chinese ownership, and the UK has become its biggest market outside China.
Yet despite marketing itself as British, of the nearly 700,000 cars MG sold globally last year, including 85,000 in Britain, not a single car was made in its former homeland.
The vast majority are produced in China, with some made in India, Thailand, Indonesia and Taiwan for the surrounding region.
‘Go where the money is’
Would Hangzhou-based Geely prove to be a more nurturing owner of Aston Martin if presented with an opportunity to turn its shareholding into full control?
Opinion is divided on whether founder and chairman Li Shufu – known outside China as Eric Li – is patiently biding his time with a view to one day pouncing.
What isn’t in doubt is Li’s enthusiasm for British car manufacturing. Geely bought the London Taxi Company, maker of the capital’s black cabs, out of administration for just £11m in 2013, later rebranding it London Electric Vehicle Company (LEVC) and focusing production on an electric version to comply with strict zero-emission targets.
Four years later it became the majority shareholder in Lotus, as years of heavy losses threatened to overwhelm the British sports carmaker.
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Lotus’s Hethel factory is no longer its main base, with 500 jobs cut there last year - Tony Buckingham
“Li’s got genuine love for Britain,” says a former Lotus executive. “He’s a real Anglophile. He understood the brand and without it [Geely’s investment], Lotus would have gone bust. It kept jobs in an area which is very reliant upon Lotus as an employer.”
Within a few weeks of the Lotus deal, Li was seeking to calm fears that manufacturing of the cars would one day be shifted to China.
“We see no reason to move 50 years of combined experience to China – let them do what they do best – in Britain,” he told the Eastern Daily Press.
There were hopes that Geely could replicate the success it had experienced at Sweden’s Volvo.
Its 2010 takeover – the first of a premium European carmaker by a Chinese firm – is viewed widely as a rare example of a cross-border takeover that has worked in the car industry, its success down to Geely’s deliberate “arms-length” approach.
The strategy has enabled Volvo to operate independently at the same time as sharing research, technology and components with Geely, rather than being managed from China.
It has also been careful to preserve Volvo’s core manufacturing footprint in Sweden. Li likens the relationship to being “brothers, not father and son”.
But like the Nanjing-SAIC purchase of the MG Rover carcass, Geely’s Lotus stewardship has failed to live up to the bill.
Reports suggest Geely has ploughed an estimated £3bn into Lotus, though the numbers are hard to verify. Whatever the true figure, Lotus continues to struggle, and the carmaker’s centre of gravity has been slowly shifting from its longstanding base in Hethel, Norfolk.
While Hethel still manufactures Lotuses, most of the brand’s electric cars are now made in China - Tony Buckingham
A new design hub and consultancy arm has been opened in the Midlands, 150 miles from its headquarters south-west of Norwich, and a suite of electric cars are being developed and built in China.
Meanwhile, Lotus continues to burn cash at a ferocious rate. The announcement of 550 job losses at Hethel – equivalent to nearly half the 1,300-strong workforce – was followed by the publication of dire trading figures: a thumping £195m loss in the first six months of 2025 exacerbated by a steep drop in deliveries to North America after Donald Trump’s tariff blitz.
One industry executive blames Geely’s failure to engineer a turnaround on a clash of cultures. “They wanted to scale it up globally, but it just didn’t work. It’s the ‘9-9-6 philosophy’ – 9am ’til 9pm, six days a week. That’s how the Chinese workforce operates ... incredibly long hours, but their experience in Hethel was that people aren’t prepared to do that.”
LEVC has fared badly too, racking up £430m of losses in the last three years. The decision to axe 180 jobs at its main factory in Ansty, Coventry – a facility that Geely built at a cost of £500m – last year was the third round of redundancies since 2022. The company says it has invested a total of £1bn in LEVC to date.
Could full ownership of Aston Martin help kickstart a revival at Lotus? Some industry sources think so, but others fear it would come at the expense of Aston Martin’s manufacturing footprint.
“China has the lowest costs on the planet, and the classic business model of China is to go where the money is. The fear is they would move it all out there. We may not like it, but in a way it’s the smart move,” an Aston Martin supplier says.
The King is a proud owner of an Aston Martin DB6, pictured during his visit to Wales’s Lagonda factory in 2020 - Rebecca Naden/Getty ImagesBritain’s car industry looks vulnerable
Some in the car industry say it’s unfair to obsess about China when Britain’s car industry has long been at the whim of foreign manufacturers.
“We used to have the same discussion about the Japanese, that they’re going to kill UK manufacturing, but Honda set up in the UK. What matters is where the manufacturing is. The ownership is almost irrelevant nowadays,” a major British supplier says.
Others half-joke that the idea of a UK car manufacturing sector is something of a mirage, and it is in danger of becoming a country in which overseas players mainly assemble cars before shipping them around the world.
At the turn of the decade, Ford ended production at Bridgend, South Wales, with the loss of 1,700 jobs. It had made 22 million cars during the 40 years it was open. The following year, Honda shut its plant in Swindon, Wiltshire, where nearly 3,500 people were employed.
More recently, Stellantis, the Franco-Italian owner of Vauxhall as well as Peugeot, Citroën and Fiat, has closed its 120-year-old factory in Luton, Bedforshire despite the site being profitable. Trade unions called the move “unnecessary”.
“Would Stellantis close a plant in France over one in the UK? I doubt it – there would be too much hassle from French workers and the government,” says Bailey, of Birmingham Business School.
Another painful reminder of the vulnerability associated with allowing vast swathes of the industry to fall into foreign hands came last week, when Nissan announced it was consolidating production at its Sunderland plant from two lines to one.
Britain can’t afford to lose any more of the manufacturing base, suppliers say.
“If you lose one, you hurt the others. You’re only as good as the whole, therefore you need it to be maintained,” says a large-parts maker, adding that some suppliers have begun to diversify their customer bases amid scepticism about a recovery.
“We’re making plans around other sectors – defence, aerospace, space and medical – most of the supply chain is moving beyond automotive. That’s not to write it off, but you have to hedge your bets,” he says.
A decade ago, the UK produced 1.8 million cars – more than at any point since 1999. In the first six months of last year, just 417,000 new cars and vans were built in the UK, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. It was the lowest number recorded for that period since 1953.
Bailey says Britain’s productivity is being damaged as a result. “We’ve neglected manufacturing, and if you look at those countries that have a more substantial share of manufacturing, like Germany, they did better after the global financial crisis,” he says.
The fact remains, however, that industry bosses in the West regard China as by far the biggest threat. Jim Farley, boss of Ford, has described the rapid rise of Chinese automakers as “existential”.
From a standing start just a few years ago, Chinese car companies have snatched 10pc of the UK market with brands such as Jaecoo, BYD and Omoda now among the most popular alongside MG, still part of SAIC.
Partner or threat?
Whether Geely is bold enough to try to add something as illustrious as Aston Martin to the mix is unclear, though Stroll has previously been suspicious of its intentions.
The Canadian accused Geely of trying to buy Aston Martin “on the cheap” in 2022 during one of many emergency fundraisings.
Yet just two months later, Aston Martin had raised a further £654m from investors including Geely, handing it a 7.6pc stake.
The following year, its shareholding had more than doubled to 17pc as part of yet another giant cash call that also landed Li a seat on the board.
Of Aston Martin’s other big investors, Geely seems the most likely to step in if Stroll chooses to walk away. Geely says it does not comment on “speculation”.
Mercedes’ stake has been gradually diluted to less than 8pc from a peak of 20pc. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which holds 17pc of Aston Martin’s shares, has been pulling back from some of its high-profile overseas interests, including the LIV Golf tournament.
But some think Geely’s interest in Aston Martin may have waned as a result of Lotus’s ongoing problems. Geely insiders say its stake has been reduced to “around the 14pc mark”.
Others question whether Aston Martin might actually benefit from China’s know-how and commercial capabilities.
“You’ve only got to look at the cars coming in now. Some of the technology is as good as anything else,” an industry source says.
Andy Palmer, who led Aston Martin until Stroll took over, says the UK should be “welcoming” to Chinese companies and see them as partners rather than a threat.
Aston Martin is synonymous with British cultural touchstones such as James Bond - Francois Duhamel/AP Photo/Sony Pictures
“They are probably 10 years ahead of us on battery technology, and they’re at least five years ahead in terms of software, and they learned that by collaborating with European and Japanese businesses,” he says.
“You have to do the same in the opposite direction: get into joint ventures and co-investment.”
Bailey agrees, but recognises the policy dilemma for ministers: “What I would like to see is the threat of tariffs to persuade Chinese producers to come here, set up production, or use spare capacity and make cars in the UK. Remember, it was Japanese investment in the 1980s which led to the renaissance of the industry.”
In Europe, such alliances are already happening. Stellantis announced plans on Friday to build a new SUV in Europe under its Opel badge, using parts and technology from Chinese electric vehicle outfit Leapmotor, in which it owns a 21pc stake.
It is also considering allowing the firm to build Chinese cars at its Madrid plant, which would enable it to avoid EU tariffs on its electric cars.
Some believe resistance to the great Chinese onslaught is ultimately futile, including one major supplier, saying: “It is the elephant in the room at every level – particularly in the car industry – they’re coming and won’t stop.
“China is the endgame for most of us in the UK.”
Aston Martin declined to comment.
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